It is so good to see a Judgement card that knows how to spell the word "Judgement"! I am biassed to judge it favourably already.

And this is one of the prettiest (yes, I chose the word advisedly) cards in the deck. It bears looking at, just for the sake of it.

At the base of the card, we see just the upper crust of a planetary curve. This is overlaid with calm water, and the sparkles on the crests of the ripples do double-duty as stars, planets and galaxies of various shapes in the depths of outer space. Standing on the planet and backlit so as to seem to glow, the shadowy and translucent figure of a robed long-haired man holds his arms open, palms up, to us in the universal gesture of love and acceptance. An explosion of light forms the top of his head. Above and to either side of him, in the eerie blue gas, are three dark, gas-free spaces reminiscent of a man's head and shoulders, and each of them has a blazing star to the left (their right). The effect is of a healer-spirit surrounded by three guides.

The card is subtitled "The Multiverse" and Kay details the theory that black holes in our universe could be the seeds of new universes, just a the standing figure could be the parent from which the other three figures grew. It is a time of revelation, of the unknown becoming known, according to Kay.

I love the card, but to me it is a protective, loving card on at least a visual level. I have never experienced Judgement as a protective, loving card before. To me, Judgement, is the harsh light of day finding its way into the darkest corners of our mind, our emotions and our pasts: all the cobwebs and corpses that other humans will never see are seen by the Judgement Angel (who is, ultimately, ourselves) and the card indicates a period or periods in our life when we call ourselves to account for one or more wrongs we have done, wrongs we will never be called to account for in life. Like the time I ... <starts sweating> ... no, let's not go there. See what I mean? that is what Judgement is, to me. And this card is too NICE! You expect that kind of gentleness and forgiveness from the Temperance Angel, not from Judgement!

You can argue that a person who has lived right can expect their own Judgement to be merciful. But I've lived right. I'd like to think the bad things I've done have all been mistakes, errors of Judgement, so to speak. But that doesn't let me off the inner hook when those times in my life arrive when the Judgement card comes calling my name. Most of the time I can live with those very same memories with equinamity, but just sometime they burn. Just sometimes an inner Singularity in a black hole of unawareness might explode into another universe of writhing, white-hot consciousness.

I find the imagery of this deck rather Christian. To me, the standing figure looks how the risen Christ is often posed; palms upward, but stigmata not shown. The imagery is like the description of creation in Genesis:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness....And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

This could be the view in heaven. It could also be the day after the predicted Judgement Day and Christ's reappearance. In view of the LWB's interpretation, this is not incongruous, as the theory referred to is the Multiverse: the possibility of concurrent universes, and universes ending and beginning continuously. The idea of heaven as a separate realm from created earth is not incongruous with the Multiverse idea, either.

<grin> I haven't had much exposure to old-school religion, so the Christianness of the card didn't even touch my awareness. I like your conception of heaven and earth being separate bubbles in the multiverse, a word I *had* thought Pratchett coined.

Yes, it did turn out to be rather Christian and I'm not quite sure how it happened! Neither Chris nor I is a practising Christian, and we don't have a particular bias either for or against.

I do think of the central figure in this card as Jesus and I'm quite happy for him to be there. For me, the traditional tarot imagery of the Judgement card is a direct expression of the Christian Day of Judgement.

And yes, it's often a difficult awakening. I like to think of this card as expressing the compassionate and merciful divine, an energy that is available for us to draw on in challenging times. It's often those most challenging times that push us to open up and just beg for mercy from whatever watching spirit is willing to help.

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